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Try to visit your school's health services and counseling center. They may be able to offer help with regards to your anxiety and/or lingering issues with your domestic situation. I know you're probably feeling pretty busy, but in the grand scheme of things the first visit isn't that long and from there you can decide whether they can do anything for you in terms of prescribing medication (sometimes via a referral) or offering face time. Do the people writing letters for you know about the hardship you've gone through? Can you address it in your SOP? I agree that you should have a strong foundation in the material considering your goals. If it ends up taking an extra year or so and re-applying, it will be well-worth it in the long run.

Here's an interesting thread on math PhD preparation started by a faculty member at an R1 program: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,63267.0.html Some of the later posts allude to at least this one professor's feelings about undergraduate institutions and reputation.

I agree with the other posters that it is not a big deal to ask for the extra night, especially since the school mentioned it specifically. I can't imagine no one else will need to stay. Even if it was just your friend, it's not unreasonable because everyone has different travel restrictions. Furthermore, it allows your friend more flexibility if things run late or there are unplanned after-visit opportunities (e.g. some current students invite him out for that last night). If he wants to get back sooner (maybe he wants to take less vacation days) and he has time to get back to the hotel before hist train, he could check his luggage there for the last day. If it's a motel or a small hotel, he might want to call and verify they have that service.

People might be able to fake references the way they've faked journal peer review: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2012/10/favorable-comme.html (This thread is getting really depressing isn't it?) OP: There are students who rationalize cheating with "Everybody's doing it and there's no way I can compete if I'm not doing it too." This is false. While there are some students who are cheating, it's pretty far from everyone and you certainly don't need it to compete. It will only make things worse. If you're really worried, start early enough that you can find good people to proofread and critique your work -- and so you have time to come back to it fresh and do the critiquing and re-organizing yourself. This will not only result in a SOP tailored to you and what you are trying to accomplish, but it will make you a stronger writer, no matter how strong you already are.

Obsessing sounds a lot like procrastinating to me. Here's a new tidbit to munch on though, possibility of a funded fourth year doing research abroad: http://chronicle.com...e-Grant/136127/

The professor might feel they are not qualified to make a response to such a message depending on its contents. It can be very tricky to craft a response that does not imply something not meant. If there's no question in the email, they might not respond as a matter of policy. Also, some professors might see this as a student trying to make excuses and that might irritate them. Since you've noticed your classmates get checkmarks and compliments, why don't you ask them if you can look over their work. Try to figure out what it is about their work that this professor likes and see if you can incorporate some of their techniques into your own analysis and writing. Take it as a challenge to broaden your ability to write for different audiences. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on and whether it is 'fair' or not, but since it isn't clear cut, you have to just do your best in the class, take from in what you can (both academically and in terms of soft skills and character development), and continue working towards your goals. You'll meet people from time to time that you don't click with, so try to make the best of it by learning how to make do around them.

It depends. What do you want to do after you learn CS? (e.g. software engineer in industry, college instructor, research etc) Is there a particular branch of CS you want to study? Would you be interested in computational biology/bioinformatics given your bio background? Do you need funding? Masters programs tend not to be funded. Sometimes second Bachelor's cost the same as Master's programs anyway, but there may be more scholarship opportunities available to them as well as fellowships if you decide to later apply for a PhD. Given California's budget problems over the last several years, some schools might not be accepting second Bachelor's -- but this might make it easier to get into their Master's program. You might want to contact the offices of the programs you are interested and see if you can talk to an advisor there and figure out what is best for your goals.

Taking the CS classes at community college will probably increase your chances over not taking them at all. If you're worried about the prestige factor, you could check if your school has agreements with any other schools that would allow you to take classes there instead. This also might be a case where the CS GRE makes sense. A good score on the CS GRE could show reviewers that while you didn't take your CS classes at a well-known institution, you do know the material. Many liberal arts colleges require a senior thesis. If yours does, do it on a CS topic. The quality of your independent work there will probably have more of an effect on your chances of getting into programs.

Graduate school applications in the US are a lot less of a numbers game than undergraduate in the US. GRE scores, GPA, and the like are all about not raising red flags and being filtered out than they are about rising to the top. These rankings are probably not much different. You use the numbers to validate your application. You use the narrative of your recommendation letters, your personal statement, your writing samples, your research experience and publication record to actually get in. I doubt the kind of inflation that makes a difference goes on. The professors doing the rankings and reading the rankings are part of a small community. If someone seriously inflates their rankings, it will get noticed. It's not worth their reputation with their peers, especially for a student who needs inflating. Whether it's top 1% or top 10%, what's being said (and not said) in the letter is going to be telling the reviewing professors the real story.

If you've been working in industry, you might want to check if your employer will partially or fully cover tuition or even has some sort of joint program. I wouldn't rule out the NSF on the basis of GPA though. With some time away you can write about it in your personal statement to show how much you've learned and matured. Also, you could take a couple courses at night or something if you have a nearby university to demonstrate you can make the grades. These could be things you didn't take as an undergrad that support your graduate research interest. Since it doesn't require GRE scores and you can use unofficial (downloaded) transcripts, it costs nothing to try for the NSF. It also helps others in your field since the number of fellowships awarded per field is proportional by applicants.

8pm EST: https://www.fastlane...v/grfp/Login.do

I would discuss it in your personal statement and then refer to it as experience that informs your plans for broader impacts. The reviewers care both about how you plan to address broader impacts and that you have a commitment to go through with them. A history of helping K-12 students get into STEM, such as you have, shows that commitment. Depending on your future plans for broader impacts, this history can also show that you have the experience in this area to follow through with your plans and know what will really make a difference. Explain how what you learned from your tutoring will allow you to integrate K-12 students into your research activities or develop materials to broaden interest in science or do other things which are described in the document I link below. There are many activities which qualify for broader impacts. Several examples are provided in this document: http://www.nsf.gov/p...examples.pdf The only reason I wouldn't include it is if you already have other activities that better address the broader impacts criterion and show a lifelong commitment to outreach and you are also out of space.

Yes. When you fill out the "Add College/University" form for your undergraduate institution, there will be some fields regarding graduate level classes. You only put down the department and number of units though. Then you upload the transcripts. If you want to describe the courses, that would have to be done in the essays, as it doesn't really fit under Fellowship/Scholarship/Work Experience or Honors/Presentations/Publications.

Yeah, Bs in graduate school can be considered warnings depending on the school and program. Many have a significantly higher minimum GPA maintained for their graduate programs than their undergraduate ones. Grad school grades are a different distribution. Use a couple sentences to address the GPA in your Personal Statement. Turn the semester you spent trying to get your balance into a positive demonstration of how you showed resilience in the face of a challenging new environment and the very next term achieved a 4.0. Tie it into the character you built during the ups and downs of research, pointing out how those experiences made it a matter of course for you to figure out what the problem was and find a solution. If applicable, explain how this misstep has made it easier for you to relate to the struggles of students your TA and/or mentor. It's hard to guess if the reviewers will carefully examine your transcript or not, so this could be a way of covering yourself while demonstrating merit.

I won without a letter from my current advisor. Like you, I was a first-year in a new program and had only been working with my advisor a short period. Also like you, I had letter writers I felt could write significantly stronger letters than my advisor.

Outreach makes the stronger application. They're looking for people who will become leaders that not only do great science, but have a strong impact on the world. You might want to touch on your situation in your personal statement as motivation for your outreach activities and explain how your experiences aid your ability to address the unique concerns of these underrepresented groups. In this article ( http://www.phy.david...SFGRFfinal.html ) on the Broader impact criterion, veteran reviewers write "“Potential contributions to diversity” refer to increasing the diversity of the US population entering science or knowledgeable about it, not to increasing the diversity of the applicant’s scientific or other interests (an unfortunate but recurring misunderstanding). Helping one or two minority or female fellow-students after class hardly constitutes real distinction here, and being a minority applicant does not automatically fulfill this criterion. The panel looks for impact—e.g., taking science to underrepresented groups in the population through work with public or independent schools, club activity, college- or university-based programs, or summer work. Initiating science activity and effective advocacy for science education are highly valued. A minority applicant might not only engage in such activity but also, through it, serve as a role model to attract others toward scientific interests. Likewise, “contributions to community” may include organizing or working with department-based initiatives, with science museums, or with students through independent programs. Applicants and their mentors should think in terms of making a real difference in the lives of others."

The tentative panel compositions are here: https://www.nsfgrfp.org/how_to_apply/choosing_a_primary_field#lifesci You still don't want to get hung up on jargon though because though the panel is full of experts, they might not know acronyms and the like from your particular area. I started off my personal statement with a field-specific joke because I expected my panel to be all from my major... but it was one that anyone who had taken (and cared about) the second semester intro course would have gotten.

The FAQ (https://www.fastlane...plicants.htm#43 ) makes it sound like they are: "Panelists are a diverse group of individuals who are recognized experts in the relevant academic disciplines and have experience in graduate education." Edit: By 'they are', I meant "were in that discipline" and not "different disciplines". I realized that was unclear.

The success rate for GRFP is about 1 in 6 (16.7%) -- approximately 12,000 applied last year and 2,000 were awarded (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124859&org=OCI&from=news ). NDSEG is about 10% (http://ndseg.asee.org/faq/the_application ). As for conflicts of interest, NSF Form 1230P applies: www.nsf.gov/attachments/108234/public/coi_1230P.doc and reviewers should not be from the home or proposed institution of the applicant, be advising the applicant, or be collaborating with anyone the applicant is proposing to work with. Simply knowing is not enough for a conflict of interest. Collaborations are usually counted as work within a period of time.

The Personal Statement essay asks how winning the award would contribute to your future career (in addition to other questions). You should mention that the GRFP will make following your direction of interest possible there. I don't know if the GRFP prefers applications like that, but I think it is a good way to address that question (along with some discussion of further future goals like becoming a professor or working NASA or whatnot.) It's hard to say with this level of detail, but that sounds like mentoring to me which is part of broader impacts. I would maybe put a statement about how I like to do this in my Personal Statement and then follow it up with success stories that illustrate you really do like to do this and it has led one or more mentees into research or a scientific career. Especially later in the essays, it's those individual success stories that tend to stick in my opinion. Sound bites early, stories later. I suppose they are less competitive given that 2,000 people won out of 12,000 last year. However, it's a process that turns down a lot of really good applicants. There are more people who would make great use of the award than there are awards to give still. That makes it pretty competitive. I'm not sure how you define 'high-risk applicants' but in my experience, the winners have put together strong applications that address the review criteria. They may not be perfect-people and some may consider themselves 'high-risk' because of past transgressions, but they demonstrate to the reviewers that they are ready to both do good science and make an impact on the world around them.

It really depends on the reviewers and how much they see the work as such and believe in it in the context of the rest of your application. There's no way to determine 'how much.' I would write about both in your Previous Research. For (b ), did you give a talk or present a poster about the research? Talk with your letter writers. Explain to them the evaluation criteria for the NSF. Give them copies of your essays and explain to them how you are addressing the criteria. No. Fastlane will ask you if you're sure you selected the right box given that you have so many graduate units already, but your transcripts will show that the units were taken as an undergraduate and thus do not count against graduate time. That's hard to know. It seems like a lot of people who don't get the award do get reviews that mention there's not enough broader impacts. However, is that because they don't have large enough public outreach or because they didn't present their outreach as well as other candidates? Also, I have seen plenty of people who got comments on their grades or research as well. Sometimes it's a reviewer that just really doesn't like like the research process. It's a plus, but unless you can weave it into your story well, I would leave it to the Awards/Honors section. Maybe your undergraduate letter writer(s) can mention how it is a national level scholarship? It's a definite plus to your intellectual merit. How much I don't know. As discussed before, it is highly unlikely that you would get reviews across disciplines. You'll get whatever panel goes with field of study you list as primary. I think you should address your ADD and take a note from irugga's application experience. I assume that now that you have the proper treatment, your more recent grades are higher? If you're worried about a stigma against ADD, you could discuss it as an unspecific 'learning disability' and 'treatment' rather than ADD and meds. (For what it's worth, I don't think any less of people with ADD.) I don't think the reviewers would give too much weight to GRE scores. I suppose your letter writers could drop a mention in the context of explaining how intellectually merited you are, but I would hope they would have better, more fleshed out stories to support the picture of you as a smart and prepared future scientist No, letter writers are extremely important. You really need strong letter writers who know you well and can write to your strengths. One of my reviewers wrote about something one of my letter writers wrote.

I also did 10pt brief/block references for the proposal and have also seen several other winners do it too. For the Research Experience, I put a line at the end stating the references referred to the "Honors and Publications" section of the application, following what previous winner Kevin Karsch had done: https://wiki.engr.illinois.edu/download/attachments/160301097/karsch1_NSFGRF09-Previous.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1283980287000

warbrain - Definitely stick with the stated rules. Some of the essays online might be from before that rule was in place. I've seen posters claim to get away with 11.8pt, but I don't think it's worth the risk. One poster got a notice of disqualification for an artifact/glitch in the margin picked up by the software they use to validate format. I'm not sure that got that sorted out. It's painful to cut, but also a useful exercise. I ended up cutting a lot of things down to essentials and entirely omitting some points. For me at least, I think it helped make my writing clearer and my message stronger. I suggest you finish your first drafts and then go through sentence by sentence and ask yourself what the sentence is trying to say, whether you can say it more succinctly, whether that point is addressed elsewhere in your essays, and how important that point is compared to everything else. Good luck and good writing! InquilineKea - Most interdisciplinary proposals will only be reviewed by one panel, just like the single sub-discipline proposals. The application asks for a listing of all fields represented in the proposal. The one listed first determines which panel will review it and what deadline applies. While the panel can transfer the application to another ( http://www.nsfgrfp.org/how_to_apply/choosing_a_primary_field ), I would guess that having reviewers from multiple panels doesn't occur too often because the reviewers in any panel are experienced in reviewing interdisciplinary work. Each application gets two reviewers minimum. The top ~35% of applications get a third reviewer as does any application where the two initial reviews diverged notably. With those two common reasons, it would be hard to attribute a third review to multiple panels instead.

Based on the review criteria from their site, it looks like they are much less interested in broader impacts and much more interested in how the applicant's goals and research are in line with the DOE Office of Science's mission. In recent years, the NSF GRFP has had an acceptance rate of around 16%. Both years the DOE SCGF was offered, the acceptance rate was around 4%. However, it's hard to judge which is more competitive based on just these figures as I don't have any information about the difference in applicant pools. It's unclear whether the DOE SCGF will be accepting applications this year. Applications were open in Fall 2009 and 2011, but not 2010. There were no funds requested for it in the 2013 budget but it sounds like the new group is funded with diverted funds, so there's still a chance: http://science.energy.gov/~/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-request-to-congress/fy-2013/Cong_Budget_2013_WDTS.pdf

A lot of people address personal development because that's what the prompt asks and they are trying to address all of the questions in the prompt. It's best if you can address them in a way that bolsters your Intellectual Merit and/or Broader Impacts. While these are the two review criteria, they're not so rigid, so sometimes personal experience can demonstrate them in ways that aren't directly tied to the short summaries of what they are. For example, showing your leadership potential tends to be very important. Though that's not directly emphasized in the Intellectual Merit/Broader Impact explanations, it makes sense because leadership is an extremely useful characteristic in being able to be transformative or have broad impacts. Also, I think often the personal development can support how/why an applicant's Intellectual Merit/Broader Impacts are believable. I suggest you address all the questions, but if you can do so in a readable way while also being able to devote 80% of your personal statement to Broader Impacts, that would be great. Probably you can weave your personal narrative through your Broader Impacts activities to show your passion and skill in your area of research and how it already has positive influence on the community at large. User irugga seems to have had some positive experience addressing a disability. I see you've probably read the posts already, but I'll link the posts for anyone else looking for similar advice: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/user/68719-irugga/page__tab__posts Several people have reported getting comments about their GPA in their reviews, so it would be good to have some explanation of any GPA hiccups.